April 2000

04/29/2000

Until recently, Pentaplaris was known from a single collection made in Costa Rica. A new emphasis on collecting all trees encountered in forest plots of fixed dimensions led to the discovery of two new species in South America; P. huaoranica Dorr & C. Bayer (figs. A, B) and P. davidsmithii Dorr & C. Bayer (figs. C-E). All three species are very large trees (up to 50 m tall) and probably would not have been collected casually. Pentaplaris was placed in Tiliaceae, but morphological, palynological, and molecular evidence suggest that it is more closely related to what had traditionally been considered Malvaceae and Bombacaceae. This was one of four plates published in a synopsis of the genus (Brittonia 51: 134-148. 1999).

A symposium on “The Computational Challenges of Green Plant Phylogeny” will be held 2-3 June at the University of Maryland - College Park, sponsored by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination (Deep Green) Group and University of Maryland Computing. Research in green plant phylogeny has advanced greatly in recent years. Following the 1999 International Botanical Congress in St. Louis, Missouri, several large datasets relevant to green plant phylogeny have been published, and several biological questions have emerged as critical to an understanding of the evolution of green plants. Speakers will include Pam Soltis (Washington State University), Mike Sanderson (University of California, Davis), Tandy Warnow (University of Pennsylvania), John Huelsenbeck (University of Rochester), and Sean Graham (University of Alberta). For further information contact Elizabeth Zimmer (Steering Committee member of Deep Green) or visit <http://www.life.umd.edu/labs/delwiche/DeepGreen.html>.

Scientists working on Colombian biodiversity will present talks in a mini-symposium sponsored by the Mellon Smithsonian Program and organized by Elizabeth Zimmer, Joe Tohme (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropicale) and Cristian Samper (Instituto Humboldt). The talks will be given on 19 June. On 20 June the visiting scientists will meet with members of their relevant departments to discuss and draft possible collaborative projects and proposals. More information on this symposium will be posted museum-wide in early May.

The United States National Herbarium is developing another tool to improve access to its fully inventoried collection of over 93,000 type specimens. Using state-of-the-art digital photography equipment, high-resolution images of individual type specimens have been generated. These images are being stored locally at present, but eventually will be placed on the Institution’s Image Archive server. As this project unfolds, smaller versions of each image will join their data record on the Department web site. The high-resolution images may be made available to researchers upon special request.

When the initial test phase, using a number of smaller families, is completed, work will commence on the families for which staff expertise exists. This is expected to be done within 12 months (excluding the entire Poaceae and Asteraceae type collections). The target for completion of the entire type collection is 5 years. As work through the type collection proceeds, specimens will also be digitized prior to being loaned out of the country. This process replaces the former task of transporting these specimens to the Photo Services Laboratory and dramatically reduces the turnaround time.

A dedicated space is being prepared in Room W427, formerly the “rug room” under the domain of the Building Manager’s Office. This renovated space will be designated the Botany Digital Laboratory. Our contract photographer is Susan Hunter, a graduate of the Savannah School of Design, and a former intern in the Photo Services Laboratory, NMNH.

In my second report for the Plant Conservation Unit, I would like to share with you my thoughts and reflections on the Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The theme of the meeting was "Biology: Challenges for the New Millennium," and we heard talks from some of the most prominent scientists around today. A number of the speakers, including Professor Edward O. Wilson and Professor Sir Ghillean Prance, stressed the importance and the use of biological collections found in herbaria and institutions such as the Smithsonian for conservation purposes. As the continued destruction of the environment persists, the information stored in these collections will become ever more valuable than in the past. Wilson and Prance both highlighted the importance of digitizing the collections, and making these databases available on the web to all researchers. The databases should include not only the images, but also significant information on location, date, population size, and other information that will be useful in preserving and maintaining high biodiversity.

Computerized and web-based databases will be useful to the conservation biologist in many ways. A multitude of questions exists that herbaria can help answer, such as "Does a certain species still exist today where it was originally collected?" and "How has a certain plant community changed since the time of collection to the present?" It is the challenge to the botantist, systematist, conservation biologist, and field ecologist to ask the meaningful questions that can help save biodiversity. One challenge at hand today is to have a biodiversity "phone book" (in the words of Dr. Daniel H. Janzen) of all extant species and their localities. Like looking up a favorite restaurant in a new city, one would be able to look up a species and find all the wild places where it grows; or type in a desired locality and get a catalogue of all species co-existing together at that site. Unlike a phone book, a web-based database can be dynamic, in which species can be added or subtracted as natural areas gets explored, destroyed or restored.

Many discoveries of new species still await us. But an abundance of meaningful data is buried in our collections. It is up to us to see that the stored information is highly accessible and widely utilized.

Over 4,400 proposals have been made to conserve and/or reject botanical names, mostly of family, genus and species names. Information on all names proposed has been compiled and is currently available on the Web at http://persoon.si.edu/codes/props/index.cfm. The site includes information on the author and place of publication of each proposal, as well as the place of publication of the committee decision, the general committee report, where cited in a synopsis of proposals, where ratified by an International Botanical Congress, and where it first appeared in a Code. The web site also allows queries.

There were a number of events that led to my building a database to account for the key events in processing all proposals to conserve and/or reject names. The first was becoming editor of Taxon (1979) and having to assign numbers to proposals. As a member of the editorial committee (1981) I took a particular interest in the appendices. The final influence was accumulating the literature for a history of botanical nomenclature (Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 78: 33-56. 1991) with an enormous annotated bibliography. This database was used to produce the synopsis of proposals on conservation/rejection for the Tokyo Congress (Taxon 42: 435-446. 1993) and the St. Louis Congress (Taxon 48: 391-406. 1999).

Thanks to the help of my assistant, Sally Eichhorn, we mined the accumulated literature to compile data on all proposals (which began in 1892). It seemed appropriate that this data (accounting for 4,432 proposals!) be made available so that anyone interested in a particular name can check to see if a proposal has ever been made. Even if a proposal is approved and the name appears in an appendix to the Code it is very difficult to track its history. If the proposal failed there is no clue. Shortly after putting it up on the Web I received an inquiry concerning a conserved name of a fossil. Not only could I tell her what she wanted to know but I also now could direct her to this tool where she reported that she herself found the needed information.

Members of the Department once again traveled to Southeast Asia to continue our collaboration with the Myanmar Forest Department on a new list of the plants of that country. Deborah Bell and Ida Lopez concentrated their efforts on an inventory of the specimens in the only two existing herbaria in the country, at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) in Yezin and at the University of Yangon. They worked in close association with Daw Yin Yin Kyi at FRI and U Myo Khin at the university to initiate the specimen inventory. The plant inventory system developed by Christian Tuccinardi and Ellen Farr was installed on the computer systems of those herbaria and the first segment of the collections including all of the monocots and a few selected dicot families were entered into the system. These inventoried records will now be compared to our recently completed revision of the monocot checklist for Myanmar. Once the collections at the two herbaria are fully inventoried, the data will constitute the most extensive documentation ever assembled of the plants of Myanmar.

At the same time W. John Kress and Michael Bordelon continued their efforts on field collections in Myanmar by travelling to Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park and Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary on the west side of the Irrawaddy River. Although the end of the dry season limited the number of taxa in flower, they found some very interesting and rarely collected species. While Deborah and Ida celebrated the famed Burmese Water Festival in Yezin, John and Michael experienced the first rains of the season as they hiked through the foothills of the Chin Mountains and Rakhine Yoma.

New to the Department's Web site is the "Botanical Exploration in Myanmar Project." This site offers a comprehensive checklist of the flowering plants of Myanmar. The checklist data include taxonomic names, distribution records, and where available, habit descriptors and common names. At the Web site you can display a checklist and distribution data for names in a family, display a list of monocot families represented in the checklist, and display a list of checklist names for a family. You can also search by state or division name to see a list of plants known to occur in that region. The current focus of the project is on the monocotyledons and will continue with the rest of the flowering plants and gymnosperms in the near future. Visit the Myanmar Project at <http://persoon.si.edu/myanmar/>.

Eric Roalson, graduate student at Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden, has been awarded a two-year Molecular Evolution Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution. Roalson is conducting molecular, morphological and chromosomal studies of members of the genus Carex for his Ph.D. At the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics and in the Department, he will work with ElizabethZimmer and Laurence Skog on a project entitled "Floral evolution in Gasteranthus (Gesneriaceae): Phylogenetic relationships and ontogenetic development of floral spurs." He is expected to arrive at the Smithsonian in September 2000.

March was a red-letter month for the local flora of the Washington-Baltimore area. On 21March, the Annotated Checklist of the Vascular Plants of the Washington-Baltimore Area. Part I. Ferns, Fern Allies, Gymnosperms, and Dicotyledons by Stanwyn G. Shetler and Sylvia Stone Orli was released. The Annotated Checklist is a complete revision of Frederick Hermann’s A Checklist of Plants in the Washington-Baltimore Area (1941, 1946) for the taxonomic groups covered. Part II will cover the monocotyledons. It is offered as a stepping-stone to a new manual of the plants of this area. The entries include common names, synonyms, indication of whether the species occurs in the District of Columbia, Maryland and/or Virginia sectors of the area, status in the flora (native or introduced), and occasional notes. The species total is 2001, with 781 (39%) being introduced.

The day after the Checklist appeared, The Washington Post carried a front-page story on the paper “Early Plant Flowering in Spring as a Response to Global Warming in the Washington, DC, Area” by Mones S. Abu-Asab, Paul M. Peterson, Shetler, and Orli (in press). This paper, based on first-flowering records of local species maintained by Shetler and colleagues since 1970, shows that in 2000 the spring-flowering plants are blooming earlier on average than they did in 1970. The 100 species with the longest records (19-29 years) were analyzed, and they bloom 2.4 days earlier than in 1970. When the 11 species (including Osmorhiza claytonii, Lonicera japonica) that actually bloom later are removed, the remaining 89 species show an advance of 4.5 days. The majority of the 100 species bloom more than 5 days earlier and some (e.g., Aquilegia canadensis, Arisaema triphyllum) bloom much earlier on average. Washington’s famed cherry blossoms, the “hook” for the Post story, are blooming about a week earlier today. These trends are all statistically significant. Furthermore, NOAA weather data over the same period show a small but significant warming trend in the area, based on minimum temperatures, and this trend correlates with the flowering data: the warmer the average minimum temperature, the earlier the average flowering. Of the more than 125 persons who have contributed to the database of first-flowering records, departmental botanists Aaron Goldberg and the late JohnJ.Wurdack have been the biggest contributors. The present database of 650 native and naturalized, and more than 1900 cultivated spring-flowering species, was created by Sylvia Stone Orli.

More information on the “Early Flowering” newspaper article can be found at the Museum’s Website <http://www.mnh.si.edu/feature.html> and the Website for the Flora of the Washington-Baltimore Area <http://www.nmnh.si.edu/botany/projects/dcflora>. At the latter site, the databases for the Checklist and the Spring Flowering Records can be searched. The data for the article can be found at <http://www.nmnh.si.edu/botany/projects/dcflora/floweringdata.html>. [by Stanwyn G. Shetler]

What lies ahead for the field of biology and biological scientists in the next century? For three days in March, 500 biologists and educators met at the Smithsonian to listen to the thoughts of some of the most preeminent biologists of our times and to discuss among themselves this very question. The meeting was organized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the National Museum of Natural History as an effort to address the present and future of biology from the perspectives of evolution, ecology, morphology, development, behavior, systematics, and conservation, as well as an integration of all of these disciplines. The presentations and interactions were a mixture of review, originality, synthesis, and thoughtful speculation.

Discussions were initiated by one of the principal architects of the "Modern Evolutionary Synthesis," Professor Emeritus at Harvard Ernst Mayr, who provided a first‑hand account of the efforts in the 1930's and 40's to integrate the disciplines of natural history and genetics into a unified field of evolutionary biology. At 95 years of age he looked ahead to the challenge of bringing developmental biology into the realm of evolutionary study. He also advised that students aspiring to become evolutionists should have a firm understanding of natural history, should not be too narrow in their study, and should be sure to "look over the fence into neighboring fields."

Professor Sir Ghillean Prance provided the first reference of the meeting to our biologically stressed planet and noted that we still have so much to learn about the diversity of life. Over 20,000 new species of vascular plants have been described over the last 20 years, clearly indicating that as systematists we have much work to do in our inventory of the world's taxa. He also succinctly challenged biologists to accept the responsibility of addressing the political nature of what we do as natural historians.

The palaeontological and evolutionary perspectives on the future of biology were provided by Professor Stephen J. Gould in a whirlwind discourse on "Darwinism Today" (also the title of a volume first published in 1907!): the interaction of science, religion and the humanities. He discussed the major successful interactions of the last 20 years in genetics and phylogeny (the "Big Tree of Life"), evolution and development, biodiversity, and the microcosm. But he recognized that the essential question of "What is life?" is still unanswerable due to the fact that so far we know of only a single experiment available for analysis.

Dr. Gene Likens recognized that interactions between natural ecosystems and society must be a major focus of biologists in the near future. He stressed the practical aspects of scientific team building, the evaluation of ecological complexity, the accumulation of long‑term environmental data, and the use of new technological tools as priorities for facing ecological issues in the future.

Morphology, as the structural basis for an organism's interaction with the environment, and development, as the process by which morphology is achieved, were the topics of Professor Marvalee Wake's address. The monogamous marriage of developmental studies with evolutionary theory is clearly the foundation of a new, if not rejuvenated, discipline in the biological sciences. She speculated on the future polygamous relationship of developmental biology with evolutionary, ecological, genetic and molecular sciences as well.

Dr. Lynne Margulis defended the "Gaia Hypothesis" as a rationale approach to understanding the relationship of the biota to the biosphere. Her explanation and exploration of the microcosm was a new window onto the microbial world for many of the participants.

How does animal behavior intersect with modern concepts of evolutionary and ecological theory? Professor Gordon Orians recognized that it is hard for us to admit that the concept of free will may be compromised by an evolutionary explanation of human behavior. Nonetheless the growing evidence supports a Darwinian explanation and understanding of behavioral traits and characteristics (of both animals and plants!). He also stressed the recent use of phylogenetic data as a powerful tool in the study of the evolution of behavior.

The "gardenification of nature" was a central theme in the thoughts of Dr. Dan Janzen, prince of tropical ecology and conservation. After years of effort in Costa Rica he admitted that we will never have a smooth transition between society and the preservation of biodiversity. We must "know it (i.e., biodiversity) and use it in order to save it." He demonstrated and justified the importance of parataxonomists in biological and conservation programs as well as the recognition of ecosystem and biodiversity services to society.

Professor Edward Wilson completed the stellar cast of plenary speakers in his address on biology and human society. He continued his call for consilience of knowledge across disciplines and suggested that the great future frontiers of biology are 1) evolutionary genomics, 2) biodiversity research, 3) large scale community ecology, and 4) linkage of biology to the humanities and the social sciences. Human nature is the product of the epigenetic rules of our evolutionary history and must be understood within the perspective of our biological nature.

These exemplary presentations formed the basis of a final round table discussion among the lecturers moderated by conservationist Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. Comments by the speakers were universal in that a consilience of societal issues and biological processes are at the forefront of our goals for the next century. Investigations in developmental biology linked with the disciplines of evolution, ecology and systematics will be a major priority in the near future. Perhaps most importantly for scientists in museums and botanical gardens was the universal call for greater accessibility to natural history collections for solving global biodiversity and conservation challenges. Our specimens contain the critical and necessary information needed for identifying centers of biological diversity for conservation. As stated by Wilson, "Biodiversity is a Linnaean enterprise" and the development of accurate and usable taxonomic classifications must be a priority for the world's centers of natural history research.

Andrew Medina-Marino has joined the plant research group at the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics (LMS) as a contract worker. He worked last year for Elizabeth Zimmer and this spring for Scott Wing as an intern through the Smithsonian’s Office of Fellowships and Grants.

David Erickson, recent Ph.D. graduate from the laboratory of James Hamrick at the University of Georgia, has joined the LMS and the University of Maryland to work on a National Science Foundation grant to Charles Fenster and Elizabeth Zimmer, on quantitative genetics of epistasis in a species of Chamaecrista (Fabaceae).